Hypotheticals Are Often Brainrot

You should probably use hypotheses instead

The world has been taken over by brainrot.

Brainrot is the attention-grabbing slop that now fills TikTok. It’s Subway Surfers and Family Guy. It’s Joe Rogan and a weird car falling down a sloping highway in low gravity. Brainrot is nonsense that grabs your attention and places it on something irrelevant.

A google search says that brainrot is “low-quality, addictive content” typically found online.

But what makes content low-quality and addictive? Content is low-quality when it lacks value. Content is addictive when it impairs your functioning.

Low-quality is not the state of being uniquely terrible, it’s simply the state of being devoid of meaning. And addictiveness isn’t when something is universally life-ruining, it’s just when something takes enough of your attention away from what’s important to hurt your life.

But why do I say that hypotheticals are often low-quality and addictive? It’s for the same reason I say that TikTok content is low-quality and addictive - it’s the natural consequence of filtering for attention.

Brainrot happens when you filter for attention

TikTok promotes content that holds your attention. That’s what makes it profitable. The algorithm figures out what people watch, shows it to them, and sprinkles in a few ads here and there to rake in billions of dollars in revenue. In this process, TikTok learns what people pay attention to.

So what do people pay attention to? People pay attention to things that are meaningful. We’re constantly looking for bits of information that can improve our lives or solve our deepest problems. So why doesn’t TikTok produce the most meaningful content? Shouldn’t TikTok learn what’s most meaningful to us, discover the best advice, deliver the deepest wisdom, and curate the most fundamental truths? Clearly it doesn’t. Instead, it produces brainrot.

The problem here isn’t that TikTok operates in short-form videos. It’s that it doesn’t filter them properly.

Short-form videos are potent and condensed. They’re rich in attention grabbing material, and dense in (what seems like) meaning. Unlike a lecture full of pauses and stumbles, every second of a reel counts. This makes them addictive. But it doesn’t make them low-quality.

The truth is that there is high-quality, transcendent, wise, and valuable TikTok content. But there is much, much more low-quality, irrelevant, and distracting TikTok content, because this is much easier to make. The algorithm can’t tell the difference, so the platform gets populated mainly by the low-quality content (brainrot).

When you filter for attention, you get flooded by low-quality content. And hypotheticals filter for attention.

When hypotheticals become brainrot

When we come up with hypotheticals, we’re really optimizing for attention, because we only entertain the hypotheticals that interest us. This might produce well-formed hypotheticals with useful conclusions. But we’ll probably come up with way more low-quality, irrelevant scenarios that seem interesting than well-formed, useful scenarios. And because we’re only optimizing for attention, we’ll consider both of these kinds of scenarios equally.

That means a hypothetical is likely to be low-quality, irrelevant, and distracting, and the principles we derive from it are probably unhelpful and possibly harmful. I consider these kinds of hypotheticals to be brainrot because they sap our attention and don’t help us.

For example, if you think about hypothetical situations that could happen if you do something, you might avoid a potential mistake you might have otherwise overlooked. But more often than not, you will come up with imaginary situations that aren’t worth worrying about. Additionally, if you use a hypothetical to derive a philosophical principle, you might reveal a deep moral wrong we’re ignorant of and could fix. But more often than not, you’ll come up with implausible scenarios whose resulting principles don’t extrapolate to reality.

I think this is embodied in many overthinkers, including myself, as well as the Rationalist community. It seems more than common for smart people to try to understand the world through the safety of their intellect rather than through the terrifying process of trial and error. And the fallacy is that our thoughts are useful just because we think them. Some of our thoughts might be useful, but most won’t be - even if they’re all compelling. Most conclusions of hypotheticals will be wrong in practice.

So how do we tell good principles from bad principles? How can we separate the braingrowth from the brainrot?

Separating the braingrowth from the brainrot

The answer isn’t more thinking. Instead, we need a filter that incorporates reality itself. We need some way to test our hypothetically good principles in real life. You know something is good if it works, and bad if it doesn’t.

I hate to say it, but we have to actually act out these principles in real life. Sometimes we need to turn our hypotheticals into hypotheses. Instead of asking “what if”, we should say “I will”, and then see what happens.

We have to try things out in our own lives, see how they work, and iterate. There is no way to model our lives other than to live it. Even then, it’s tough. But eventually we might stumble into something that is about the right strategy, kind of, most of the time, that’s hopefully better than what we had before. But we probably can’t think our way into it.

This extends beyond hypotheticals. This is how true curation happens.

The curation of time

A common complaint is that modern music sucks. And this complaint is kind of true, because at any given time, what tops the charts is often generic, common denominator slop. Meanwhile, music from the past seems to be generational.

What’s going on is that the form factor of a song filters for what holds your attention. You need people to listen to the whole thing, right? And just like with TikTok, and with principles derived from hypotheticals, and anything that we can come up with, this produces a bunch of brainrot. But it also produces some gems.

When we only filter for attention, like with the popularity of songs, we’ll surface both the slop and the classics. And slop is way easier to make than classics, so popular songs will probably be slop. But over time, the filter changes. It’s no longer all about attention, although attention is still required. It becomes about something more like utility. To survive the filter of time, something must be memorable, useful, and somewhat transcendent.

This doesn’t just apply to music. It also applies to evolution. Evolution works by generating a bunch of slop - embodied hypotheses about how to survive - and then sees how they play out. What’s common in a single generation is cool, but what survives for thousands of years is classic. This has produced all living organisms, which are beautifully complex and awe inspiring.

But these things - great music, life itself, and how to live - cannot be computed. They can’t be captured by thought, only tried by action. You can try to use hypotheticals to uncover the principles of the world, but you can only tell if those principles are any good when you play them out. And the best way to play things out is to live them. Until then, it’s just brainrot.

So don’t use hypotheticals to figure out the world. Use hypotheses. And see what happens.